Talk:Illegal drugs

Contents

In my opinion, this page is poor, provides an over simplified view of illegal drugs and seems to be written based solely on information from government advice pages. For example, the first sentance "Illegal drugs are often addictive", misses the opportunity to actually introduce the topic of drugs and their legal status as opposed to a blanket statement of "Illegal drugs are often addictive" which provides no basis for anything.

Any thoughts?

Illegal drugs are chemicals, pills, liquids, or p arts of plants that make people become intoxicated.

illegal drugs are chemicals, pills , liquids , or parts of plants that have been banned by the law making body of a country.

"Ilegal drugs" is probably a poor description: Many of the drugs listed can be used legally for some purpose.

What is legal and what is not depends on the country.

There are countries/areas where certain drugs are illegal, but where the ban is not enforced.

Obtaining a prescription drug may be illegal without prescription, even though the same drug is sold over the counter in a lower dosage.

In short, we probably need to fix these issues and find a better name for the article. --Eptalon (talk) 15:39, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

What about narcotics?

A map could help, I'm sure we could "steal" one from en. I've seen plenty with details as to legalities of certain drugs.

You (or any of us) could add a section about that.

But, the main point I wanted to state is that the article could be renamed "narcotics" or plain "drugs". --«Erin» 23:06, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

I like the idea of merging with Narcotics. The page on Narcotic does state that the two aren't exactly the same, but the English Wikipedia page on Narcotics admits that the term has become imprecisely defined. Kansan (talk) 23:14, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Most other languages link to pages about the trade with such substances, illegal drug trade. The problem with merging to narcotics is that not all such drugs have narcotic effects, some are stimulants (esp. the so called "party drugs"). There are two issues, describing the drugs (or at least naming them), and describing their trade. The problem may be bigger than it seems. There are generics (same drug, other trade name, mostly same active substances), and there are the counterfeit drugs (may be anything really). So merging to narcotics may not be the best choice --Eptalon (talk) 23:39, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

this page is pretty good but needs more

This article needs a lot of improving

statements like: 'They are often addictive', and 'They can also be bad for people' are quite unclear and not well substantiated. More sources are needed. Maybe I'll improve this article when I have the time; it is quite out of shape Further problems include: "The slang term for this" and many other vague and statements need to be replaced or substantially reworded. For example, "slang terms for this include"

"...in many countries because the governments are worried that if people take these drugs, the people will get sick or hurt themselves, because many drugs are addictive. The word "addictive" means that a person will want to keep taking the drug, even if it is making them sick."

Alcohol hurts far more people than many illegal drugs, this is clearly and obviously not the government's concern otherwise Alcohol would be banned/illegal. Smoking causes self harm and harm to others around you by increasing the risk to cancer and deteriorated lung function issues, asthma in children exposed and so on. The government did not illegalize smoking tobacco. The government's concern is not health. 50.47.140.236 (talk) 15:08, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I re-wrote the article as best I could in a simple English format. I tried to remove all the bias and falsities contained in the previous article, as well as add useful information and try and remove some of the ambiguity of the term "illegal drugs" (laws differ by country and region, plus some "illegal" drugs are available via prescription etc). Feel free to revise / delete / re-write etc. I tried to talk about generally "illegal" drugs but in some cases it was hard to do so because there isn't actually any fundamental difference between legal and illegal drugs.

Issues remaining:

The name of the page is inaccurate for the reasons I mentioned above. The page should probably be moved or incorporated into a larger topic.

There are no citations or sources. Though to be fair there wasn't any in the old version of the article either.

Hello there, I looked at the edits of the last two or three months, most edits by unnamed editors are some sort of vandalism. For this reason, I have protected the article. For the next few months, editing is restricted to named editors, that have been autoconfirmed. Unnamed editors who want to contribute should create an account to do so. Those that do not want to can discuss the changes here, and have a named editor perform the change for them. --Eptalon (talk) 09:05, 30 May 2013 (UTC)